Where You Want To Be
prologue - my love

by Karen H

When someone dies, you mourn, try to come to terms with it and move on with your life. But no matter how you move on in your life, the death has somehow changed your life, who you are and what you become. Sometimes it can be subtle and other times not so subtle.

That’s exactly what happened when Jen died.

We all mourned, learned to accept she was gone, or at least tried too. Some of us just buried our heads in the sand and tried to mask what was really there. So the changes start to kick in and maybe they’re not what you expected. But you re-evaluate your life, you decide on what’s right and you go for it, make the changes.

Seems simple enough right? You learn life is too short so you better start living it the way you want it. But what about when you start to question your choices? What happens when the moment of realization occurs and you’re suddenly hit with the knowledge that you aren’t happy, you’ve been deluding yourself.

Death is a five letter word that leads to all sorts of emotions. Love, when it dawns on you just how much you love the person who died and although there may have been a time when you didn’t like the person, you can’t imagine things ever being different in the end.

Death can also give rise to another four letter word, fear! It’s in everyone; we’re all scared of something. Losing, being unloved, alone, abandoned, turning into something we’re not. It can sometimes become totally consuming that you take your worst fear and lock it away somewhere, but although you have managed to put it somewhere out of reach it can still be controlling you, pushing you to make the wrong choices.

Combine the two, love and fear and what do you get? A girl who was so scared of her greatest fear, losing the one she truly loved, that she tried to stop herself from loving him too much. That she decided to be with someone else.

Her reasoning?

Maybe she thought the true love of her life would one day leave her, maybe she thought that if she gave that love a chance it wouldn’t be all it cracked up to be because there are times when the fantasy is better than the reality.

I can hear you now, who would do such a thing? The answer is me, Joey Potter.

My story isn’t like your ordinary story. See I have a soulmate; the only problem was we pretty much were embryos at the same time. Some people even joke that we’ve been friends since the womb, but close enough. We met too young and when you are faced with something so strong at only 15 it can be hard to bear. So you fight it and say everything will work out, because you both know you are meant for one another. In the end you hurt each other so much, date friends and best friends of said soulmate and at some points even take your ‘friendship’ beyond all realm of survival but it’s never enough to make that love go away completely.

It’s there on the backburner, waiting to be re-ignited.

And it happens, there’s a wonderful twenty-four hour period when everything is well - wonderful. Blissful even. And well, in-keeping with the relationship history something happens and things may or may not be blown out of all proportion but what is clear is that hurtful words are exchanged and things are left almost in ruin. The friendship is seemingly dead until later there’s a reconnection followed by a long time of communication only via e-mail that suddenly dies until a wedding brings everyone together again.

Then tragedy strikes and a friend dies, a young friend. Too young. The thought passes through your head, it could have been me or worse…him, the love of your life.

Thoughts pass through your head of how you think you’d react to hearing the news that he’s dead and before you know it you are having visions of a life without them. Knowing that the love that at times you thought you would suffocate without could ultimately be gone forever, sends waves of panic through you. This panic feeds the fear.

This is all made easier by the fact that you think he’s moved on because he’s not showing a romantic interest and little do you know that the exact same things are probably flowing through his head too.

There’s a part of you that craves love, but at the same time doesn’t want to risk the flame burning out. The abandonment, the harsh reality that it will end when one of you dies or one of you chooses to leave. So you think to yourself that it’s better to have that love, if only as the friend.

And an old extinguished flame gives a clear indication that they are very much interested and although your love for them does not compare to that of the love of your life, you think it can be enough. It can sustain you.

So yeah, you pick the best friend, Pacey. You know you love him in some way and a short time later he moves into your apartment in New York, gets someone to manage his restaurant in Capeside. The first few months are great; things are going nicely until suddenly he’s restless and misses his own restaurant. Sure he’s tried to get something else but it’s not the same and he wants to return.

This is what you were afraid of with the soulmate. Being left alone.

So you try and work it out, try to stay together but the only way to do that appears to be by taking a big step. No, not that big but close enough. You give up the job you have when something opens up in a publishing house on the outskirts of Boston. It’s not exactly Capeside, but its close enough to commute to, especially if you manage to find somewhere to live that’s midway.

So everything slowly begins to get that feeling of normality about it, the routine is back and things appear to be going great…until things start to go pear shaped. It starts when you one day turn up at work to find that the company has gone bankrupt and that job that wasn't as good as your last one is now gone.

And the life you thought may have been on its way to being great again seems in tatters. You know it's only a job, there are worse things in life, but you've not long given up a great job. You sink into a kind of funk, trying to find a job but there's not much work for you coming on the market and with there being so many other people in the same position as you, it's hard.

Naturally, your turn to your boyfriend for comfort and in the beginning he's all, “there, there” and pats your back as you wonder what you're gonna do, but within a week things are strained. You hope against hope that he'll somehow understand what you are going through, but he appears to be oblivious to what you feel. The arguments become pettier and more frequent until one day he tells you to stop moping around and get back in the game (“I get it Jo, you’ve lost your job but there’s no use moping about it. You have to pick yourself up and get on with it”) when really that is what you've been doing (“gee, I had never considered that”).

You storm out; go to visit a friend, your sister. And you find that these people have more sympathy for you than your boyfriend and that's not right. The reason for your increased moodiness around him is because there's some part within you that blames him for the situation you are in. If he hadn't wanted to leave New York, things would be fine for you. You wonder if he really tried to adjust and you think maybe you need a break to cool off, collect your thoughts and get re-motivated for finding a job.

In a sense this is where the new chapter in the book of your life begins. It’s almost your twenty-fifth birthday and right now Pacey is not the one you want to spend that birthday with, so under the guise of needing to recharge your batteries you tell him you’ve decided to go to LA to visit some friends. He knows who those friends are and he says fine. He may go on some fishing or camping trip with his brother then.

So the call is made, “Audrey, is your apartment fit for a guest?”

“Hey babe, if it’s fit for me and you want somewhere to stay for a visit without paying a cent then its fit for you too!”

Things are how they always are, there’s laughter and gossip and an offer to be met at the gate when you arrive, “hey, I may even carry a bag for you!” She tells you before hanging up.

So the flight’s booked and the bags are packed, and little do you know that you’re life is about to change.

And all because you’d made one wrong choice that at the time you thought was right. And if you actually sit and analyze it you feel that you may be a bad person because you denied a sick woman her dying wish so to speak.

Her death was to be my motivator and in the end it had the opposite effect.

I knew I had one big decision to make when she was still alive, to pick the one I knew was right for me. But just like all those other times, I allowed the fear to take over. Look where that got me.

Sometimes, after I had already had the realization that it was really the wrong choice to make, I would wonder if she knew who I really longed for.

Would she know I made the decision to run and close that part of myself off?

Was I really foolish enough to believe all along that I’d have the ability to quell that yearning? I’d never been able to do it before, why should this time have been any different?

I guess since this is the next chapter of my life I should probably start at the beginning, not the beginning from when we were fifteen, but from how things came to be the way they were. It began with a dream, not an idea like you have when you say “I dream of someday being a singer”, but a dream you have when you sleep.

Even as I write this, moments from this dream flashes inside my head.

My body writhing under his as his hips rocked against my own as they rose almost involuntarily off of the bed, crashing into his. His hands in my hair, on my breasts…everywhere - as I dug my heals into the soft bed, trying to prolong the inevitable! Waking in a sweat feeling totally unfulfilled after the realization it was only a dream. Craving that warm strong body on top of your own, yet not fully realizing who that body even belongs too.

It’s probably best to start from the moment I arrived in LA as opposed to just diving right into the dream, because some seeds were already planted before that dream even occurred. So sit back, grab something to drink and I’ll tell you the story…